The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt for July 29, 2014, is Back to Life. It asks:

After an especially long and exhausting drive or flight, a grueling week at work, or a mind-numbing exam period — what’s the one thing you do to feel human again?

After especially long and exhausting activities, the one thing I do to feel alive again is to be a blob. Ironic that being so unhuman can make me feel human again. I wish I could say it was jogging, yoga, a long walk outside, or some other healthy thing. Exercise is a good thing, but I would say regular exercise is better to help prevent me from feeling totally drained than to help me bounce back once there.

When I need to recharge I just plain need down time. I like to stretch too, though, especially after physical challenges like a long car ride. So maybe that makes me a stretchy blob. Kind of like slime! Stretch and bend. I might even stick to something like the couch. But otherwise I do not want to do much of anything. I don’t have to be blobby for that long, but how long partly depends on how drained I am in the first place. Likewise if I have a little charge left in me, I may add a bit of reading, writing, drawing, playing a game, or watching a movie. Is there a movie called Return of the Blob? Blobby-ness helps me to return. I just have to make sure I avoid the quicksand and get moving again before long …

I had Friday off so I could see my daughter in a summer-camp rendition of Annie. It was a lot of fun. They did it in only three weeks so it was very impressive. Each child had a number of different parts except Annie.

My daughter played an orphan, the apple seller, and a member of the Warbucks household staff. Plus she was super fun as Rooster, the conman brother of Mrs. Hannigan. A friend of hers was an excellent Daddy Warbucks.

How did I not realize until this moment that Daddy Warbucks name is ‘war’ and ‘bucks.’ Like war money? What’s up with that? I may have to look up more info on why they gave him that name. I guess it may just be the time period with World Wars and some companies doing very well as a result. But still.

Also on Friday we went out to lunch and saw a movie. So it was a pretty full day of things that we don’t get to do very often. I’ll take it! I even got a few shopping list items scratched off my list.

Saturday we did a little something fun along with some more shopping and a bit of the usual laundry dance.

Sunday is here already. It’s the last day of the weekend. Monday will be here bright and early tomorrow. Weren’t you JUST here, Monday?

I’m trying to get in my ten minutes of writing by just sitting here and plopping down some words because I don’t know if I’ll get it done any other way today. I’d like to work on a story and some Daily Prompts, but even more so I just want to manage ten uninterrupted minutes, right now, if I can. Then I’ve got more household stuff to take care of. Need to purge and organize at least some parts of our wee, dark home. Hopefully I’ll get more writing done later.

I’d really really really like to get a story done for the last Enchanted Spark Writing Contest. The end of July is coming at me at break-neck speed. Seriously, July! Slow down a bit would ya?

As a kid, you must have imagined what it was like to be an adult. Now that you’re a grownup (or becoming one), how far off was your idea of adult life?

When I was about six years old I remember thinking that one day I would be eight years old. Eight seemed so old. So grown up. So far away.

I didn’t especially like the number eight at the time. I much preferred seven. Eight seemed sinister. Perhaps because it rhymes with “hate.” I’m not really sure, but that’s what my pre-eight-year-old mind thought about it.

Then one day, I turned eight years old. It was fine. I didn’t feel very old, but now all the six year olds looked really young.

Becoming an adult has been somewhat similar. I have a few aches and pains, but I don’t especially feel forty-something. I certainly don’t feel old or even that mature. I just kind of feel like me. But now when I see people who’re in their twenties they look so young. Practically babies!

Aside from not feeling especially “grown up” there are several things I didn’t expect about achieving adulthood.

One of the biggies is how busy I would be. It’s hard to manage my time and all the activities. Work. Mom stuff. Food. Cleaning. Once in a while down time is needed to reboot, but you end up having to steal it from somewhere because it doesn’t usually happen on its own.

You have to plan for your plans to change. No matter how much planning I do, events always seem to turn out different than I expected. Childbirth. Dinners. Picnics. Christmas. Travels. It’s like the line in “Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows” when Harry ask when it was that one of their plans ever worked out as they expected. (I’ll add a link to a video if I can find it.)

You still need to plan, but then you have to accept the situation when it turns out differently. That’s going to happen a lot more than you think it will when you’re younger.

The biggest thing I didn’t expect about adulthood is how much laundry there would be. It’s one of the great myths of being grown up. You think you’ll be free when you’re of age, but in reality there’s a never-ending stream of dirty clothes following you wherever you go. You’ll need to wash those.

Oh sure, you can fold the clothes and put mount laundry away. You’ll be mostly done. Maybe you can even skip a day. But unless you’re doing laundry in the buff, while your family is likewise in the buff, you will never ever be completely done with laundry. You can get the family to help, and I suppose you could hire other people. But the fact remains that you must still deal with it. Not even our cats have to deal with laundry. This is strictly a human thing.

They don’t tell you that part about growing up.

I’ll try to clue in my daughter. Perhaps her goal, as an adult, can be to someday hire somebody to do the laundry. I can help her learn how to handle the laundry situation efficiently and effectively, so that it doesn’t become a thing. I’ll plan that. We’ll go from there.

(By the way, I edited this as I thought of more things. But the laundry, it’s always a thing.)

When was the last time you watched something so scary, cringe-worthy, or unbelievably tacky — in a movie, on TV, or in real life — you had to cover your eyes?

Short answer, Under the Dome, the miniseries based on Stephen King’s book of the same name.

I covered my eyes for several sections, at the beginning, where the dome comes down and people or animals are caught in the unfortunate position of being not quite all the way in- or outside the dome. Perhaps that’s the punishment, in King’s world of Chester’s Mill, for being a little wishy-washy about ones stance on things. Are you in or are you out?! Too bad for those in the middle.

Regardless, it was grody. I don’t like gore even in a broadcast-safe show which is probably what Under the Dome is considered. I only recently started streaming it on Amazon. I peeked from between my fingers, but I really didn’t need to do that.

You’re at the beach with some friends and/or family, enjoying the sun, nibbling on some watermelon. All of a sudden, within seconds, the weather shifts and hale starts descending from the sky. Write a post about what happens next.
If you need visual inspiration, this happened last week in Russia:

The first time I ever saw hail I thought pumpkin seeds were launching themselves out of the ground. Hail bounces when it hits, and it was the size and shape of pumpkin seeds. Never having seen this icy form of precipitation before, pumpkin seeds were my closest visual reference. Why they were popping out of our neighbor’s lawn was beyond me. But bits of ice falling from the sky and bouncing several inches from the grass didn’t seem any more logical at the time. It wasn’t even cold out! Context is important.

Changing from a lovely, sun-shiny day at the beach to clouds, rain, and hail can be jarring to say the least. Swimwear offers little protection against the sting of ice balls at terminal velocity. When this kind of change happens in the span of a few seconds you might scratch your head and wonder if the earth is coming to an end. If not the earth, then surely your sunny day at the beach is doomed and you better grab your watermelon and towel and take shelter stat.

That’s when you get out your cell phone or video camera and record this little atmospheric surprise party because you’re still not entirely sure you aren’t imagining this. Maybe you fell asleep on your beach towel after you ate that second slice of pepperoni pizza and your un-quenchable thirst is driving some strange dreams. So even with all the witnesses, you want evidence. Because, really? Hail. Wasn’t it sunny just a minute ago?

Change can be like that – one minute it’s sunshine and watermelon, the next, the world is flinging ice pellets at your head. The trick is to escape serious injury and get through it. Maybe you gather evidence. Maybe you now have fresh ice for your Diet Coke. Enjoy.

Today, write about any topic you feel like — but you must reuse your opening line (at least) two more times in the course of your post.

We are still living behind the fluffy, pink walls. It almost sounds like fun, but these odd, temporary structures were built to facilitate repairs on our building. The crew can work on the outside while residents remain living inside.

I’m not sure how much I feel like writing about our cotton candy walls, but I’m hoping we can look back on this someday and say, “whew, we made it through!” There’s a lot of tragedy in the world right now. Our stuff seems pretty minor. But it’s our stuff.

These repairs are needed to fix faulty construction and the resulting conditions. Previous attempts did virtually nothing. Now that our buildings have practically turned into oatmeal, this is what’s necessary to really truly make our buildings sound. Put simply, the outside 25% of our home is being demolished and rebuilt. Some neighbors have not taken well to the repairs. They add angry, sometimes even comical, notes to public message boards.

It has been a long, drawn-out process. This mess shouldn’t ‘t happen in modern days of county building inspectors. But it did.

When the temporary “security walls” went up in early April, folks asked us how long it would take. The standard notification put the rough estimate at 2-5 weeks. I said I wouldn’t be surprised if it took two months.

And here we are. It has been over three and a half months. We are still living behind the fluffy, pink walls. The smell of freshly sawn wood has subsided, but it’s still pretty strange.

There’s near total darkness in our living room no matter what time of day. Is it 2:00 in the afternoon or 2:00 in the morning? We check a clock and turn on lamps.

Our “walls” are made of 2x4s, clear plastic sheeting, and pink household insulation. They have become like a fourth resident – a guest who has overstayed a visit.

Repairs are getting done. That’s good!

And an unexpected bright spot in all of this has been the workers. They sometimes sing and yell in Spanish or even play music. If I’m home I can hear them as if they’re in the same room. They kind of are in the same room. It’s quite surreal and usually makes me smile amid the chaos.

But I miss the windows. The natural light. I’ll think I’m fine and then one morning the darkness will feel heavy again like a blob from outer space.

We try to get out when we can. We need our sunlight and vitamin D. And we try to keep suitably occupied while indoors using a few of our light-emitting window-shaped devices.

Under the Dome is a TV miniseries based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. I’m not normally much of a Stephen King fan, and don’t normally watch much television.

It was the middle of the night. I was awake and too tired to do much else, so I thought I might stream some Firefly on Amazon. That’s when I saw the gleaming bubble on the artwork for Under the Dome.

I got hooked. King is certainly good at that.

I watched a little during the day, and then my daughter saw a bit of it. “What’s that, Mom?” I wondered if it was age appropriate for her, but I let her watch some.

She thought it was creepy. She’s right. Then, a couple of days later she wanted to watch more. So did I.

We had just watched another episode when I looked up at our pink, fluffy walls and said, “I kind of feel like we’re living under a dome with these walls.”

My daughter replied, “Yeah, I was just thinking that same thing!”

At least the dome let’s the light in. And well, we’re not trapped inside to the point that we can’t get out, so that’s good. Really good even.

But there is a strange fluffy presence looming over us from floor to ceiling. Much like the residents of Chester’s Mill, we don’t know when this barrier will go away. We are still living behind the fluffy, pink walls. It’s a process and maybe a strange little adventure.

In a way, everything I do feels like a form of procrastination. If I’m doing the laundry, it means I’m not doing something else like cleaning the sink in the bathroom. So I’m thinking there’s a very fine line between procrastination and prioritization.

There is, perhaps, a two-stage litmus tests for this difference. First, does the object of my attention actually need to get done? And second, does it need to get done now?

If I’m doing something that needs to get done, then it’s probably more an issue of prioritization. Laundry needs to get done. But if I should really be doing something else at this very moment, then it also becomes a form of procrastination. Doing the laundry but there are dishes I should get done before I make my daughter’s lunch which needs to happen now. So basically I procrastinate all the time and call it prioritization. I seem to get more stuff done this way.

Pretty much any time I’m writing, I’m procrastinating on some level, because there’s always something else that needs to get done. That’s both procrastination and prioritization. If I make writing a priority, then am I still procrastinating?

Maybe procrastination becomes a matter of degrees. How badly am I procrastinating? Laundry is a sort of single-level procrastination. It needs to get done, but probably not five minutes before we’re supposed to leave the house.

Then there’s double-level procrastination. That’s stuff that I don’t need to do, and I definitely don’t need to be doing it now. Because all it does is steal time from all the other things that need to get done.

For me, the two things that I name as my biggest vices are Carcassonne and Candy Crush (it’s not just candy from the 70s). Neither one of these needs to get done, but they happen. Oh, I try to multitask to minimize the amount of precious time it’s sucking from my life. Play a little Candy Crush in the bathroom anybody? (Sorry if that’s too much information.) Bathroom time needs to happen. Why not multitask? Sometimes my brain really does need a break from all the “must do” things and Carcassonne and Candy Crush offer that in a colorful, satisfying, calorie-free way. I can’t do laundry or dishes in the bathroom. I might as well play a game. So wait, isn’t that a form of single-level procrastination? It doesn’t really need to get done, but if I’m going to do it, that’s a good time. It all seems logical to me until the family yells, “hay, are you playing Carcassonne in there?”

You get to plan a dinner party for 4-8 of your favorite writers/artists/musicians/other notable figures, whether dead or alive. Who do you seat next to whom in order to inspire the most fun evening?

Planning where people sit at a dinner party would be like a special kind of torture to me. I can’t help but shake my head at this type of contrived social stuff. I prefer a gathering that lets guests sit where they like. Hors d’oeuvres and cocktails then meander to the table.

I understand why people might assign seating. For example, somebody’s Aunt Gloria and Cousin Martin argue which makes everybody miserable. Don’t let them sit next to each other. Fine. I figure those people will probably avoid sitting next to each other anyway, and if they don’t we’ll adjust as needed if there’s a problem. I don’t mind sitting next to anybody in my family. And I like sitting next to new people.

On the other end of that social spectrum, there are times you might want to seat folks next to each other because you’re sure this will be a good thing. Perhaps there’s a gathering of dignitaries whom you’re convinced will facilitate peaceful agreements if you give them talk time at a relaxed dinner party flowing with their favorite single malt. Go for it. You want to hook up Tim and Juanita because you’re sure they will really like each other. OK.

If I was having a high-level important dinner party, I might consider hiring somebody who loves to do that planning kind of thing. There are people like that. Maybe I’d ask a friend for advice.

What I’d really like is to have a buffet so people could sit and eat what they like and occasionally return for seconds thus allowing guests to shuffle seats so that they can talk to a variety of people. That sounds like fun! I want to talk to everybody and let them do the same. For that matter, since I’d want to have a variety of excellent food too, a good buffet seems like the way to go. People can eat what they like while sitting where they like.

So let’s say I’m having a dinner party, and we’ve established that I’m not going to stress over who sits where. I’d probably want to invite John and Hank Green and their wives. I’ve enjoyed vlogbrothers videos for years. John is a writer, and Hank, a musician. I love John Green’s writing. He seems like he’d be very cool to talk with at a party. I first saw vlogbrothers videos when Harry Potter Deathly Hallows was being released, and Hank sang “Accio Harry Potter.” It was great! I felt like there were like-minded people in the world! Other than Hank, I’m not really in awe of having musicians as dinner guests, so I’m probably not going to invite more unless they’re there purely for entertainment, they also do something else, or they happen to be somebody’s spouse. Don’t get me wrong, I love music. I love musicians.

I’d invite Samuel Clemons — he was great on Star Trek TNG! (Yes, I know he wasn’t really on ST:TNG.) But he really seems like he’d be a good conversationalist at a party.

Joanne (J.K.) Rowling and her husband. I’m a pretty big Harry Potter fan (see above), and she seems like a sharp lady. I’d probably ooze with fangeekness and embarrass myself, but I would not care.

Maybe John Scalzi and his wife because I’ve enjoyed his blog for decades (not actually decades, more like decade plus) and his books too. And I’ve maybe already had dinner with them before a long long time ago, but that’s another story. So then perhaps I shouldn’t invite them, but that would probably be wrong because I think it would be fun.

I’m at nine people and not yet done with my list. That was fast.

I’d like to invite Ray Bradbury. I’d question him on how not driving works for him because D doesn’t drive either. I’d like tips on making that work well. Also his were some of the few science fiction books on my high school reading lists, so I got to read him and get school credit. What’s not to like?

Do I have to count spouses in the 4-8 people limit? I mean, can it be 4-8 notable people and the rest are an unspecified number of other invitees? ‘Cause, if so, I’d invite spouses, and I’d like to invite friends and family who would enjoy this little shindig too.

If I’m strictly limited to inviting only 4-8 people total, then I guess I’d have to drop Scalzi and his wife because I’ve not met the other people before.

Hold on. Kurt Vonnegut. I forgot about Kurt Vonnegut. I’d like to include him. Would it be rude to drop some of the spouses?

I remember being a young teen or tween and catching the movie Slaughterhouse-Five on late-night TV. I was supposed to be asleep and every ten minutes or so I’d tell myself I’d watch for only ten minutes more, but I watched the entire movie. More recently, I read Vonnegut’s Advice to the Young on Kindness and more. I love that he can admire Jesus without being Christian. I wish everybody could appreciate the teachings of wise people without having to take sides on religion. I love Vonnegut’s take on kindness and forgiveness. I think more of both would go a long way toward making the world a better place. There seems to be too much eye-for-an-eye mentality, today, and, well, ever.

Wait! I just remembered another one to invite … And, what, I only invited one woman? That can’t be right.

What do you find more unbearable: watching a video of yourself, or listening to a recording of your voice? Why?

I am behind on these Daily Prompt blog posts. My links to pingback the Daily Prompt site had a “https:” at the beginning instead of “http:.” Oops. How’d that “s” get there? So pingbacks weren’t working to add my blog entries to the list of prompt-inspired blog posts. One pesky little letter.

As for what I find more unbearable: watching a video of myself or listening to a recording of my voice? Letter “s” trumps again! I don’t like the sound of my recorded voice whether a sound-only recording or video with sound. I do not sound like I think I sound. I sound like a little kid.

Sometimes I leave voicemail for D at home, and if he doesn’t listen to it before I do, then I end up hearing my own voice. It is a little bit like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard. OK, not that bad, but weird nonetheless.

If you could paint your current mood onto a canvas, what would that painting look like? What would it depict?

I think I’d need a good sized canvas with gallery-wrapped edges – the kind where you don’t necessarily need a frame and the painting itself is about two inches thick. Maybe it’s even a cube. I am a bit square, and I cram a lot into my schedule. So right now, I could use the extra space. Hmm, does that mean I’m spacey?

I like color and contrast, so I’d hope my mind would come out that way. Parts might be colorful interspersed with simple shades of black, white, and grays. I’m happy and kind of stressed too. I’m afraid there would be sections that would start out making lots of sense – perhaps like the dinner with zucchini that’s on my mind or the craft soap we’re making in the kitchen — but then it’s going to change because there are words and letters popping in. There will probably be some weird parts I can’t quite figure out. Happy parts that look like laughter and love. And I’ll probably have one section that looks like a little pool of goo — that’s me when I’m tired.

Most people, I find, have some unexpected surprises lurking inside. Maybe I will too.